I always figured the higher your education and the more money people had the better their manners would be. So why is it that so many people with a lot of money and a higher education seem to be the rudest or most disrespectful?

Rudeness is a form of disrespect. Disrespect is a lack of love/empathy for one's fellow human beings. Sometimes, people with a lot of money or with a lot of education seem to think they are "better" than others. But "more" does not always make something "better". However, when one believes they're better than another, it's often easy to treat others with disrespect.

It may have something to do with centuries of cocky, mean upper class gentry types from other civilizations- nobles in feudal Europe and Japan, scholar-gentry in China, etc. Back then, if you were the king's best bud, you'd be in the money, but that could change at the drop of a hat. So when the next dynasty came in and appointed their friends, the people who had previously been on the receiving end of the stick were now holding the stick, so they used it to lash out and get back at everyone else. I think that continued to today and now most everyone who is rich acts this way. The other theory is that poor people are more generous because they know what it's like to be poor and therefore will help out others more willingly.

I'm a contractor and work in homes of all kinds of people. I find rich people in general to be the most polite and helpful. I find renters to be awful to try and work with, sometimes almost animalistic in thier behavior and living environment. People who aren't really rich but are living rich are the worst, pretentious and over compensating...and then you never get paid.

That said, for years I was involved in a high risk sport that involved guys of all social classes. And there was a clique of upper middle class and rich guys who behaved with a sense of entitlement and an insanely distorted view of their own worth and level of accomplishment. Rude, dishonest, stuck-up, amoral. Just imagine the bad preppie frat house in any 80's movie.

Manners are a matter of training, not money, and an increasing number of people who have the latter disdain the former as 'plebian' or 'beneath them'. All you have to do is look at the headlines in any tabloid magazine to understand that 'upper class' and 'classy' are pretty much a contradiction in terms any more. We can thank the Hippies for this. Most of them were from wealthy families, and figured by rejecting anything resembling civilized behavior they were rejecting 'the man'. Once they (titularly) grew up and had lifestyle accessories -er, children- of their own, they raised little Miffy and Dunstan the same way, so now 'upper class' and 'crude, narcissistic asshole' are equivalent terms. Sad, really.